Andrea Jenkins  ( 1961 - )

Andrea Jenkins made history in 2017 when she became the first African American, openly transgender woman elected to public office in the United States. As a politician, poet, activist, and community historian, Jenkins strives to bring “the notion of love into the public discourse.”

Andrea Jenkins was born on May 10, 1961. Assigned male at birth, she grew up with her mother, Shirley Green, one sibling, and two of her cousins in the North Lawndale neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side. Jenkins’s father battled heroin addiction and spent much of her childhood in prison. Shirley worked as an office administrator. Jenkins described being raised by her mother in a “pretty authoritarian” but “very loving” manner with an emphasis on education. She spent every weekend at her grandparents’ house in the Chatham neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Chatham, a middle-class African American neighborhood, was in stark contrast to Jenkins’s “hard-working and low-income” neighborhood, and she thus says she “experienced all of Chicago from the deep poverty to the striving middle-class Black Chicago.” She was also aware of her family, who had from to Chicago from Alabama as part of the Great migration, history. Those experiences and history “deeply informed [her] life.”

Jenkins spent her childhood participating in Cub Scouts and playing football at Robert Lindblom Math & Science Academy on the South Side. She also loved literature and poetry. She remembered learning “everyone can be a poet” when Gwendolyn Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet laureate of Illinois, visited her First Grade class. Her early high school mentors included poet Haki Madhubuti, one of the founders of the Black Arts Movement and Third World Press (now the largest independent African American-owned publisher in the U.S.). Jenkins recalled her experience with Madhubuti at 14 really got her involved with “Black history, Black culture, the 1960s Black arts movement” since “Haki was really a believer that you must use poetry for social justice.”

It was a lesson she kept close to her heart as she continued to write poetry that often focuses on the intersection of race, social justice, gender, and sexuality. She has published several acclaimed volumes of poetry, including The T is Not Silent (2015). At the beginning, her own gender identity was “never a subject” of her poetry. “I was thinking about it,” Jenkins said in an interview, “but I would never, at that point in life, express my inner gender identity thoughts in a poem.”

In 1979, Jenkins started at the University of Minnesota, an overwhelmingly white school at the time. She was shocked at the differences in resources and access between white and non-white students. She also experienced racial stereotyping on campus. She lived in male dorms and eventually joined a fraternity. When speaking of these college years, Jenkins said “In many ways a lot of my life was really trying to hide from what I knew to be true inside myself…I knew I was a girl, but I didn’t want people to reject me.” One of her fraternity brothers, her roommate, “outed her;” the fraternity expelled Jenkins from the house and she was forced to return to Chicago since she had no where else to live. When Jenkins told her mom why she was back home, she came out as bisexual (Jenkins still identifies as bisexual). Her mom took her back in, assuming her sexuality was just “a phase.” Jenkins recalled, “I knew at this time I was trans, but again I could just not accept it for myself, and so consequently could not tell my parents or anybody about it.” While in Chicago, she made her first foray into politics by working on Harold Washington’s successful mayoral campaign in 1983, making him the first African American mayor of Chicago.

While in her mid-20s, Jenkins married a woman and had a daughter who remains “the absolute love of [her] life.” She also began work as a vocational counselor for Hennepin County, a role she would have for over a decade. At 30, she divorced her wife and came out as a trans woman. “I just really realized that I [couldn’t] go on any more, hiding the truth from myself. Hiding the truth from those who I love. If I am going to thrive in life, I have to come to grips with who I am, and I have to accept it,” Jenkins said in an interview. While Jenkins began her transition, she also returned to college and finished her B.A. in Human Services from Metropolitan State University at age 38. She went on to complete two more degrees: an M.A. in Community Development from Southern New Hampshire University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University.

Jenkins’s political career began in 2001 when she served on the successful campaign of Minneapolis City Council Candidate Robert Liligren. She then became one of his staffers. In 2005, City Council member Elizabeth Gidden hired Jenkins as her aide. While working for Gidden, Jenkins won the 2011 Bush Fellowship “dedicated to transgender issues,” helped establish the Transgender Issues Work Group, and organized a City Council summit on transgender equality and the problems facing the transgender community in Minnesota, both in 2014. After 12 years as a Council aide, Jenkins began curating the Transgender Oral History Project at the University of Minnesota’s Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies. A primary focus of her curation is to grow the collection of trans narratives by recording oral histories. In 2015, Jenkins served as the grand marshal of the Twin Cities Pride Parade.

When Giddens decided not to seek reelection in 2016, Jenkins ran for the open seat. She was also motivated to run because of the 2016 presidential election and wanted to make changes around issues of equity in Minneapolis. Jenkins took her mom to the polls, and later said “I do want to just acknowledge the tremendous feeling of voting for oneself, it’s unlike anything you can imagine.” Jenkins won her 2017 election to represent Ward 8 with 73% of the vote. She was one of a few transgender candidates who won their elections during that cycle. Her colleagues in the City Council then elected her Vice President of the Council.

In the Summer of 2020, Jenkins was again thrust into the national spotlight after the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. Floyd was a resident of Jenkins’s districts. In the wake of Floyd’s murder, Jenkins insisted racism was a public health crisis and played a central role in re-examining the funding and structure of Minneapolis’s police department.

In 2022, Jenkins won reelection to the Minneapolis City Council with 86% of the vote. Her colleagues then unanimously made her President of the Council, another historic first for an openly transgender person. With her new mandate, Jenkins wants to bridge gaps in her community, fight for accountability within the city’s police department, and expand access to affordable housing, health care, and living wages. She hopes her public service “serves as an inspiration for other trans and gender-nonconforming people.”

While her jurisdiction may be limited, Jenkins continuously hears from transgender people from all over the country seeking guidance and help. In an interview with The Washington Post, Jenkins said “Transgender people have been here forever…I look forward to more trans people joining me in elected office and all other kinds of leadership roles in our society.”

Works Cited

“About Andrea Jenkins,” City of Minneapolis, https://www.minneapolismn.gov/government/city-council/ward-8/about-andrea-jenkins/

“Andrea Jenkins,” National Black Justice Coalition, https://beenhere.org/2017/05/10/andrea-jenkins/

Brooke Sopelsa, “Andrea Jenkins is First Openly Transgender Black Woman Elected in U.S.” NBC News, November 8, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/andrea-jenkins-makes-history-first-openly-black-trans-person-elected-n818966

Madeleine Carlisle, “America’s First Openly Trans City Council President Wants to Heal Minneapolis,” TIME, January 25, 2022, https://time.com/6141967/andrea-jenkins-minneapolis-trans-issues-policing/

“Minneapolis City Council President Andrea Jenkins,” The Takeaway, WYNC Studios, February 4, 2022, https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/blackqueerrising-minneapolis-city-council-president-andrea-jenkins

Oliver Laughland, “Andrea Jenkins: the first Black openly transgender woman to hold US public office,” The Guardian, March 11, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/11/andrea-jenkins-first-black-transgender-woman-us-public-office-minneapolis-george-floyd

Tat Bellamy-Walker, “Andrea Jenkins makes history as 1^st openly transgender city council president,” NBC News, Jan 11, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/andrea-jenkins-makes-history-1st-openly-transgender-city-council-presi-rcna11829

How to Cite this page

MLA – Rothberg, Emma. “Andrea Jenkins.” National Women’s History Museum, 2022. Date accessed.

Chicago – Rothberg, Emma. “Andrea Jenkins.” National Women’s History Museum. 2022. http://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/andrea-jenkins

Image Credit: "Andrea Jenkins - Minneapolis City Council" by Tony Webster, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Additional Resources

“Andrea Jenkins for Ward 8,” https://www.andrea-jenkins.com/

“Andrea Jenkins Minneapolis Poet,” https://andreajenkins.webs.com/

Erik Tormoen, “Q&A: Andrea Jenkins, Minneapolis’ New City Council President,” Minnesota Monthly, April 14, 2022, https://www.minnesotamonthly.com/lifestyle/people/qa-andrea-jenkins-minneapolis-new-city-council-president/

 

Cecilia Chung  (1965 - )  Cecilia Chung is a groundbreaking advocate for the transgender community and those living with HIV/AIDS. For decades, she has worked on the local, state, and national levels to end the discrimination and violence that her communities face.

Cecilia Chung was born in Hong Kong in 1965. Chung was assigned male at birth and from a young age, she described feeling different and misunderstood in her gender identity, but didn’t know how to express it. In grade school, she realized she was attracted to boys and, as a teenager, thought it meant that she was gay.

Chung immigrated to the U.S. with her parents in 1984. They settled in Los Angeles, but Chung soon moved to San Francisco to attend the City College of San Francisco. She transferred to Golden Gate University and graduated in 1987 with a degree in International Management. After college, she worked in finance and as an interpreter for the Santa Clara County court system. At the age of 22, Chung began her gender transition. Living as her authentic self brought significant challenges for Chung. Her parents opposed her transition and Chung did not speak to them for over three years. She lost her job at in the court system, likely due to her transition, and then became homeless.

Chung turned to sex work in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood in order to survive. She also started using drugs and soon learned that she was HIV positive. But Chung never regretted transitioning. She said that this difficult period in her life "sounds painful, but it's actually more painful to not know who you are. I would rather be really trying hard to survive than to look in the mirror and not see myself." These experiences led Chung to devote her energy to working on behalf of the transgender community and those living with HIV/AIDS.

In 1994, she joined the city’s Transgender Discrimination Task Force, which issued a landmark report on the injustices that trans individuals faced every day. The task force’s efforts led the city to enact several pioneering anti-discrimination policies. She also worked as an HIV test counselor and a counselor for residential facilities, and then as a caseworker for a housing program.

In 1995, two men attempted to sexually assault Chung. She fought back and one of the assailants stabbed her in the arm. She suffered a punctured artery, a severed tendon, and nerve damage. Chung was rushed to the emergency room, where she was joined by her mother, whom the hospital notified of the attack.

Though it took some difficult conversations, Chung and her family reconciled before long. Chung also continued her groundbreaking work as an advocate for transgender rights. She was the first transgender woman and first Asian individual elected to chair the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Celebration. She was also the first transgender woman and first person living openly HIV to lead the San Francisco Human Rights Commission.

Chung joined the Board of the Asian Pacific Islander Wellness Center in 2002 and worked on their mobile HIV testing project for transgender youth. In 2004, Chung served as one of the founding organizers of Trans March, an annual event that now takes place in cities across the country. The following year, she was named the first Deputy Director of the Transgender Law Center and in 2011, Chung served on California’s Civil Rights Enforcement Working Group.

Chung’s advocacy work rose to the national level in 2013 when President Barack Obama appointed her to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. She served two terms on the council, retiring at the end of President Obama’s time in office. In 2015, Chung founded Positively Trans, a network intended to address the stigma and inequities faced by transgender people, particularly people of color, living with HIV. The network is supported by the Transgender Law Center and the Elton John AIDS Foundation and focuses on story-telling, policy lobbying, and leadership development.

Today, Chung is the Director of Evaluation and Strategic Initiatives for the Transgender Law Center, as well as a member of the San Francisco Health Commission. Chung’s long record of public service has been recognized with the Levi Strauss & Co. Pioneer Award; the San Francisco AIDS Foundation Cleve Jones Award; the Human Right Campaign Community Service Award; and as a California State Assembly’s Woman of the Year award, among others. Her life story also inspired a character on the ABC miniseries When We Rise (2017), which documented the history of the LGBTQ+ movement from the 1970s-2010s.

Chung continues to make history as a passionate civil rights advocate and dedicated public servant.

By Mariana Brandman, NWHM Predoctoral Fellow in Women's History

Works Cited

“About Cecilia Chung.” Cecilia Chung.com. Accessed May 26, 2022. http://www.ceciliachung.com/bio

“Cecilia Chung: 2018 Phoenix Award Honoree.” APIQWTC. 2018. Accessed May 26, 2022. https://apiqwtc.org/phoenix-award-honoree/2017-cecilia-chung/

“Cecilia Chung joins the Transgender Law Center team as a Senior Strategist.” Transgender Law Center. Jan. 18, 2013. Accessed May 26, 2022. https://transgenderlawcenter.org/archives/3086

Ford, Olivia G. “This Positive Life: Cecilia Chung on Violence, Gender, Prisons, Family and Healing.” The Body. May 16, 2013. Accessed May 26, 2022. https://www.thebody.com/article/this-positive-life-cecilia-chung-on-violence-gende

Glover, Julian. “'Possibilities are limitless': Trans activist shares journey from homelessness to policy advocacy.” ABC 7 News. June 21, 2021. Accessed May 26, 2022. https://abc7ny.com/cecilia-chung-transgender-law-center-positively-trans-our-america-who-im-meant-to-be/10734669/

Knight, Heather. “Cecilia Chung, transgender health advocate.” SFGate. Jan. 12, 2013. Accessed May 26, 2022. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Cecilia-Chung-transgender-health-advocate-4189493.php

Pham, Xoai. “Honor Trans Elders: Cecilia Chung Is the Mother We All Wanted.” Autostraddle. May 7, 2020. Accessed May 26, 2022. https://www.autostraddle.com/honor-trans-elders-cecilia-chung-is-the-mother-we-all-wanted/

How to Cite this page

MLA – Brandman, Mariana. “Cecilia Chung.” National Women’s History Museum, 2022. Date accessed.

Chicago – Brandman, Mariana. “Cecilia Chung.” National Women’s History Museum. 2022. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/cecilia-chung

Image Credit: “Cecilia Chung at Trans March San Francisco 20170623-6639.jpg" by Pax Ahimsa Gethen, CC BY-SA 4.0.

 

Jane Jacobs  (1916-2006)

American and Canadian writer and activist Jane Jacobs transformed the field of urban planning with her writing about American cities and her grass-roots organizing. She led resistance to the wholesale replacement of urban communities with high rise buildings and the loss of community to expressways. Along with Lewis Mumford, she is considered a founder of the New Urbanist movement.

Jacobs saw cities as living ecosystems. She took a systemic look at all the elements of a city, looking at them not just individually, but as parts of an interconnected system. She supported bottom-up community planning, relying on the wisdom of those who lived in the neighborhoods to know what would best suit the location. She preferred mixed-use neighborhoods to separate residential and commercial functions and fought conventional wisdom against high-density building, believing that well-planned high density did not necessarily mean overcrowding. She also believed in preserving or transforming old buildings where possible, rather than tearing them down and replacing them.

Early Life

Jane Jacobs was born Jane Butzner on May 4, 1916. Her mother, Bess Robison Butzner, was a teacher and nurse. Her father, John Decker Butzner, was a physician. They were a Jewish family in the predominantly Roman Catholic city of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Jane attended Scranton High School and, after graduation, worked for a local newspaper.

New York

In 1935, Jane and her sister Betty moved to Brooklyn, New York. But Jane was endlessly attracted to the streets of Greenwich Village and moved to the neighborhood, with her sister, shortly after. 

When she moved to New York City, Jane began working as a secretary and writer, with a particular interest in writing about the city itself. She studied at Columbia for two years and then left for a job with Iron Age magazine. Her other places of employment included the Office of War Information and the U.S. State Department.

In 1944, she married Robert Hyde Jacobs, Jr, an architect working on airplane design during the war. After the war, he returned to his career in architecture, and she to writing. They bought a house in Greenwich Village and started a backyard garden.

Still working for the U.S. State Department, Jane Jacobs became a target of suspicion in the McCarthyism purge of communists in the department. Though she had been actively anti-communist, her support of unions brought her under suspicion. Her written response to the Loyalty Security Board defended free speech and the protection of extremist ideas.

Challenging the Consensus on Urban Planning

In 1952, Jane Jacobs began working at Architectural Forum, after the publication she’d been writing for before moving to Washington. She continued to write articles about urban planning projects and later served as the associate editor. After investigating and reporting on several urban development projects in Philadelphia and East Harlem, she came to believe that much of the common consensus on urban planning exhibited little compassion for the people involved, especially African Americans. She observed that “revitalization” often came at the expense of the community. 

In 1956, Jacobs was asked to substitute for another Architectural Forum writer and give a lecture at Harvard. She talked about her observations on East Harlem, and the importance of “strips of chaos” over “our concept of urban order.” 

The speech was well-received, and she was asked to write for Fortune magazine. She used that occasion to write “Downtown Is for People” criticizing Parks Commissioner Robert Moses for his approach to redevelopment in New York City, which she believed neglected the needs of the community by focusing too heavily on concepts like scale, order, and efficiency.

In 1958, Jacobs received a large grant from The Rockefeller Foundation to study city planning. She linked up with the New School in New York, and after three years, published the book for which she is most renowned, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

She was denounced for this by many who were in the city planning field, often with gender-specific insults, minimizing her credibility. She was criticized for not including an analysis of race, and for not opposing all gentrification.

Greenwich Village

Jacobs became an activist working against the plans from Robert Moses to tear down existing buildings in Greenwich Village and build high rises. She generally opposed top-down decision-making, as practiced by "master builders" like Moses. She warned against overexpansion of New York University. She opposed the proposed expressway that would have connected two bridges to Brooklyn with the Holland Tunnel, displacing much housing and many businesses in Washington Square Park and the West Village. This would have destroyed Washington Square Park, and preserving the park became a focus of activism. She was arrested during one demonstration. These campaigns were turnaround points in removing Moses from power and changing the direction of city planning.

Toronto

After her arrest, the Jacobs family moved to Toronto in 1968 and received Canadian citizenship. There, she became involved in stopping an expressway and rebuilding neighborhoods on a more community-friendly plan. She became a Canadian citizen and continued her work in lobbying and activism to question conventional city planning ideas.

Jane Jacobs died in 2006 in Toronto. Her family asked that she be remembered “by reading her books and implementing her ideas.”

Summary of Ideas in The Death and Life of Great American Cities

In the introduction, Jacobs makes quite clear her intention:

"This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning to Sunday supplements and women's magazines. My attack is not based on quibbles about rebuilding methods or hair-splitting about fashions in design. It is an attack, rather, on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding."

Jacobs observes such commonplace realities about cities as the functions of sidewalks to tease out the answers to questions, including what makes for safety and what does not, what distinguishes parks that are "marvelous" from those that attract vice, why slums resist change, how downtowns shift their centers. She also makes clear that her focus is "great cities" and especially their "inner areas" and that her principles may not apply to suburbs or towns or small cities.

She outlines the history of city planning and how America got to the principles in place with those charged with making change in cities, especially after World War II. She particularly argued against Decentrists who sought to decentralize populations and against followers of architect Le Corbusier, whose "Radiant City" idea favored high-rise buildings surrounded by parks -- high-rise buildings for commercial purposes, high-rise buildings for luxury living, and high-rise low-income projects.

Jacobs argues that conventional urban renewal has harmed city life. Many theories of "urban renewal" seemed to assume that living in the city was undesirable. Jacobs argues that these planners ignored the intuition and experience of those actually living in the cities, who were often the most vocal opponents of the "evisceration" of their neighborhoods. Planners put expressways through neighborhoods, ruining their natural ecosystems. The way that low-income housing was introduced was, she showed, often creating even more unsafe neighborhoods where hopelessness ruled.

A key principle for Jacobs is diversity, what she calls "a most intricate and close-grained diversity of uses." The benefit of diversity is mutual economic and social support. She advocated that there were four principles to create diversity:

1. The neighborhood should include a mixture of uses or functions. Rather than separating into separate areas the commercial, industrial, residential, and cultural spaces, Jacobs advocated for intermixing these.
2. Blocks should be short. This would make promote walking to get to other parts of the neighborhood (and buildings with other functions), and it would also promote people interacting.
3. Neighborhoods should contain a mixture of older and newer buildings. Older buildings might need renovation and renewal, but should not simply be razed to make room for new buildings, as old buildings made for a more continuous character of the neighborhood. Her work led to more focus on historical preservation.
4. A sufficiently dense population, she argued, contrary to the conventional wisdom, created safety and creativity, and also created more opportunities for human interaction. Denser neighborhoods created "eyes on the street" more than separating and isolating people would.

All four conditions, she argued, must be present, for adequate diversity. Each city might have different ways of expressing the principles, but all were needed.

Jane Jacobs' Later Writings

Jane Jacobs wrote six other books, but her first book remained the center of her reputation and her ideas. Her later works were:

• The Economy of Cities. 1969.
• The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle Over Sovereignty. 1980.
• Cities and the Wealth of Nations. 1984.
• Systems of Survival. 1992.
• The Nature of Economies. 2000.
• Dark Age Ahead. 2004.

Selected Quotes

“We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves.”

“…that the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. The presences of great numbers of people gathered together in cities should not only be frankly accepted as a physical fact – they should also be enjoyed as an asset and their presence celebrated.”

“To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.”

“There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.”

By    Jone Johnson Lewis       ThoughtCo..

•  
• Updated on August 14, 2019
•  

 CITATION

Lewis, Jone Johnson. "Jane Jacobs: New Urbanist Who Transformed City Planning." ThoughtCo, Aug. 27, 2020, thoughtco.com/jane-jacobs-biography-4154171.

 

RACHEL LELAND LEVINE, M.D. (1958 - )  is the Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health, having been appointed by President Biden and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. She previously served as Pennsylvania Department of Health Secretary and the head of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corp., becoming the first transgender four-star officer. She has also as professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and the chief of the Division of Adolescent Medicine and Eating Disorders.

Dr. Levine was born October 28, 1957, in Wakefield, Massachusetts with the birth name of Richard L. Levine. Levine has one sister. 

She grew up attending Hebrew School.  Then graduated from Harvard College and Tulane University School of Medicine.   Levine completed her residency in pediatrics and a fellowship in adolescent medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center.  It was during this period that Dr. Levine married Martha Peaslee Levine with whom she has two children.  The couple was divorced in 2013.

Dr. Levine describes her transition as slow, deliberate and filled with research.  The transition began when she started seeing a therapist in 2001.  She announced herself as transgender in 2011.  Levine took the step of attending voice lessons so she would sound more like a woman.

In a statement at the time of her appointment to Assistant Secretary of Health President Bien said “Dr. Levine  will bring the steady leadership and essential expertise we need to get people through this pandemic – no matter their zip code, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability – and meet the public health needs of our country in this critical moment and beyond.”  “She is a historic and deeply qualified choice to help lead our administration’s health effort.”

 

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For more stories of remarkable women, see HERSTORY on womensvoicesmedia.org

Ruby Hirose (1904-1960)

Although it is a part of history we do not like to admit, the United States did—and still does—have internment camps to isolate individuals that the government deems “suspect.” Native Americans were sent to live on reservations so colonists could access more desirable land. In more recent events, detainment camps were established at Guantanamo Bay to interrogate and torture those suspected of terrorism. One instance that tends to go under the radar in history class and current news is the Japanese internment camps that appeared on the West Coast after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Dr. Ruby Hirose, a researcher in the Midwest for William S. Merrell Laboratories during World War II, luckily escaped this fate by simply not living on a coast. As such, Dr. Hirose did not leave Ohio and was able to conduct her research without the constraints of living in an internment camp. Unfortunately, her siblings and father were not as lucky as her because they were Japanese-American residents of Washington State.

A graduate from University of Cincinnati, Dr. Ruby Hirose was a Japanese-American biochemist and bacteriologist who conducted vaccine research in infantile paralysis. A sufferer herself, Hirose also conducted research in hay fever—which is basically another way of saying “pollen allergies”. She researched a way to improve pollen extracts to desensitize hay fever sufferers.

In addition to her valuable research on the polio vaccine and on hay fever, she also published a paper titled “A Pharaceutical Study of Hydrastis Canadensis” which can be found in full here. In this paper, she chronicles the history of a native North American plant called Hydrastis Canadensis, also known as Goldenseal, and the history of its use. She chronicles how Native Americans first used this plant for dyes and as a way to treat sores and how Lewis and Clark documented this plant during their journey to the west coast. She also tried to find the best conditions in which Hydrastis would grow.

 

This research is oddly symbolic of her experience during World War II. She was an American born-and-raised just like Hydrastis Canadensis. She found her “best condition for growth” in research in Ohio as this was a place that allowed her to utilize and embrace her gift as a researcher.

Hirose’s talent and work flourished and ultimately made her one of the 10 women who was recognized by the American Chemical Society for her accomplishments in chemistry in 1940. She gave back to America even though fear mongering during wartime did hold back many of her relatives.

She was buried in the Auburn Pioneer Cemetery in Washington state—the very state that sent her family away to an internment camp during the war. In the end, the research she conducted to improve the quality of life for others will live beyond the confines of wartime limitations. Her efforts will continue to inspire others to discover their passion for science.

Article written by: Alexandra McHale

NYU WOMEN IN SCIENCE

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For more stories of remarkable women, see HERSTORY on womensvoicesmedia.org

Sources:

http://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_arc_297429

http://www.doublexscience.org/notable-scientists-overlooked/

http://www.themarysue.com/women-in-science-gallery/

http://images.sciencesource.com/preview/14700646/BW3366.html

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jps.3080190409/abstract